Paramilitary Groups Vow To Fight On

April 10, 1998|By MATTHEW McALLESTER; Newsday

BELFAST, Northern Ireland — Even if participants in the peace talks succeed in their race to find a solution, sectarian violence will continue, say paramilitary groups that plan to escalate their campaigns of terror.

While ``we have blood in our veins, we are duty bound to fight the Union'' with Great Britain, said one dissident, who left the Irish Republican Army in 1977 because he felt it was on its way to the type of political compromises that it now seems to be considering.

``There's no two ways about that,'' the man in his late 40s insisted. Any political ``agreements are totally irrelevant to us.''

The disaffected republican, and his counterparts among some of the equally unhappy Protestant militias, embody the worst nightmare of those pushing for a settlement to end hundreds of years of fighting in Northern Ireland. While politicians representing many in the conflict sit around a table debating the details of joint councils and political participation, it is clear that some groups are unwilling to stop the war that has taken more than 3,000 lives since the troubles returned in 1969.